The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Some networking applications require switching between a high number of ports. For example, a typical data center includes a large number of servers, and switches to communicatively couple the servers to outside network connections, such as backbone network links. As another example, a high-volume website server system can include a large number of web servers, and switches to communicatively couple the web servers to backbone network links.
In these and similar switching applications, it is difficult to efficiently load-balance network traffic and ensure that latency requirements are met, especially when multiple hardware components are used in a single switching system. Moreover, it is particularly difficult to load-balance network traffic when hardware components receive, transmit, and process data at different rates.